Monday, August 8, 2016

How To Get (Un)stuck On a Book: 5 Ways to Jumpstart Your Writing

Some months
ago I started noodling on an idea I had for a book, and suddenly it started
coming together. I was going to cafes to write, and coming home with drafts of
entire essays, feeling very smug and happy. This book was coming along fast,
and although I knew it would be a short one, I was thrilled because it was
something very different to my existing style, and something I really was
enjoying writing.

Then something
happened. Life got in the way, I had other projects, goals. I decided to up my
fitness level and didn’t want to be sitting around in cafes drinking
calorie-laden frappucinos. I somehow decided to revise an earlier book I had
written, thinking it would take me a few weeks to edit it, at most a month.
Then months went by, and every time I tried to work on the book, I couldn’t
capture that old easy flow, that excitement of words hitting notes that I could
only hear in my head. I kept waiting to be inspired, to feel that old rush, and
kept feeling annoyed at myself for not being able to get back to the rhythm. In
the meantime, this revision that would only take a few weeks, was turning into
a bear, and so much time had passed that I was embarrassed to talk about my
work, and started to break down in public if anyone asked me the dreaded
question: so what are you working on right now?

So the last
few weeks, I have been trying any manner of methods to get me back into the
flow, to get my work done and out without compromising quality, and to stop
rueing the day I decided writing would be a good thing to take up. And these
are a few of the strategies that I have uncovered. Of course none of them are
particularly original, and no one strategy seems to work on its own or for very
long, but feel free to cycle through and try them out, and maybe if you’re
stuck like me, you might find yourself excitedly getting back to the page.

1. Lower Your
Expectations

Yup, this is
the first one. And I know its not terribly glamorous or exciting, but promise
me, this alone might jumpstart you back to work. With both my projects, high
expectations has been constantly tripping me up and causing me to waste time.
When I first started writing my little book of essays, I was doing it for fun
and just to see if I could. Then it started to seem like it would be good, at
least to me. And then the voices of expectations started off in my head. This
book would show people another side of me as a writer. My friends and family
would be amazed at my breadth of ability. I started to write the answers to
imaginary interview questions about my work in my head. And obviously, the
writing dried up. I couldn’t put down another word no matter how many caramel
frappucinos I sacrificed my health on.

I found that
lowering my expectations - by telling myself that this was a very very first
draft, a zero draft (a term I learnt in law school, and has been very useful
since then), I could give myself permission to do it badly, to suck. This is
something you read all the time, usually a paraphrase of Anne Lamott’s famous
phrase: “write sh*tty first drafts”. The only problem is that for the book I
was revising, I was meant to be revising it, making it better, not writing crap
drafts. So then I found myself stuck trying to perfect the book in one draft, until
it hit me.

I could write
many sh*tty drafts, not just the first one. This is also from Hilary Rettig by
the way, who advocates many many drafts, and I wrote about this a few posts ago. My process is such that I anyway do many drafts, I even label each
document I am working on by the number of draft and version - so this revision
was usually Chapter 6 2.2 or 2.3 or whatever. (I know that makes me sound OCD,
but whatever works.) But because this was a revision, I was somehow counting
the previous several versions as my many, many drafts, and trying to get this
done in 1 or 2. When I let go this ridiculous notion, I could give myself
permission to just do my best with this draft and move on, knowing I could come
back in a few days and improve it. That freed me up to get through my current
draft faster, and actually made the work better, cleaner, and the whole process
less stressful.

There is
another aspect to lowering expectations. Not just for this draft, but for the
whole work. Sure, no one wants to write a bad book, or create something that
isn’t as good as they can make it. But here’s the thing - the best you can do
is as of this moment. As creatives and artists, we keep growing and improving.
From one week to the other, one month to the other. Which is why I am revising
the book I mentioned, because my ability to write that sort of book has
improved, and I know I can make it much better. But that basically also means,
that maybe right now you can’t write as well as your favorite author, or even how
you initially imagined the work in your head.

This is
definitely the case with my little book of essays. I imagined it to be in the
vein of some of my favorite humorous writers, whose essays I absolutely adore.
I really want someone to chuckle to themselves while reading my prose. But
alas, perhaps that’s too much of a burden to place on the very first book of
(hopefully) humorous essays I am writing. Maybe by the third or fourth one I
will have gotten better. But by putting all this pressure on this book right
now, I essentially found it impossible to write a word, strangled all the fun
out of the process, and brought it all to a screeching halt. So now I have
hopefully learnt my lesson, and am trying to just write the essays for my own
amusement, see what happens, see what I can make of them.

2. Do
Something Else (Creative)

So you can’t
make progress on this project. But that doesn’t mean you can’t do anything
else. Sometimes exercising a different creative muscle, doing something else
that also brings together the different ways we think and experience the world
on to a specific canvas, can blast away the block on the project we wish to
work on.

Work with
paints, glitter, washi tape, notes, iambic pentameter, your iPhone camera,
Play-doh, the possibilities are endless. Make a painting, a candle, take a
photograph, make a 10 second video, write a poem, create something to decorate
your bedroom, paint some furniture, cook a gourmet meal, paint handprints on
the wall - do something that gets your quirky juices flowing, that gets you
doing and not thinking about doing. Something that you can point to and say, I
made that. Whether its physical or only exists in the cloud doesn’t matter,
what matters is something exists when before it didn’t.

At the very
least you would have made something, and remembered what that feels like. As a
bonus perhaps, you might have a breakthrough in your stuck book project.

3. Eat In
Bite-sized Pieces

The cliche
goes - how do you eat an elephant? A bite at a time. And I have found that
eating as if you were a hummingbird, taking the littlest, barely visible,
tiniest of bites, can remove the fear of tackling even the largest pachyderm.

Maybe there is
a small part of your project that you can handle. You can write the
introduction or the preface. You can write the scene that you have mapped out
clearly in your head. You can write the chapter for which all your research is
done. If nothing else, you might be able to write the acknowledgements, or work
on the bibliography.

With this
revision I am working on, I was finding it difficult to move forward. So
instead of focusing on the chapter level, I started to think about each individual
section. Some of these sections were only a few 100 words long, but breaking
the chapter down mentally meant even when I was stuck on one section, I could
complete another one. I made a little map, and kept track of which sections
were done, just to generate a feeling of progress.

4. Track Your
Progress

Talking of
progress, I find that tracking how much I have done and how much I have left to
go is usually incredibly motivating, and serves to jump-start me out of my
block.

You could do a
very simple-drawn table or just make notations on a spare sheet of paper, or
you could be like me and create color-coded and highlighted tables. It doesn’t
matter what your particular method is, but I find that what gets tracked gets
done. Usually before I track my progress, I bumble along, and try to hold the
whole book in my head. I think, oh I really need to work on chapter 6, but then
again, hmm I am not sure about the ending. What about chapter 4 - but there is
that part in the middle. And I talk myself out of working on it, or open all
the documents, stare at them and run away from the computer in a panic.

After I make
my detailed table or map (which has the added benefit of taking some time that
is clearly marked work, but isn’t writing), I find that it is much clearer to
me which parts I can safely work on. The easy parts, the ones I know exactly
what to do, are suddenly clearer.

This of course
ties in to the previous point - break down your work into smaller pieces, and
then track how many pieces you have completed. Suddenly the picture of the
elephant will start to fill in. You will see that there is a leg here, and a
foot there, and an ear over here. The pieces that are done are increasing,
getting sharper and more into focus. And then you find, that the next lot of
sections that you can tackle comes into relief.

Use whatever
method you think will help you track - I have experimented with stickers,
labels, colored highlighters, fancy charts in Excel, OneNote and Evernote. The
point isn’t how to do it, but that you do. Remember, what gets measured gets
done.

5. Have Some
Fun

The final
trick up my sleeve? Get away from it all and do something fun. Watch a movie
that you’ve been looking forward to seeing, preferably something that sets off
your creative senses (for me its usually something with brilliant special
effects or an exceptionally good story). Go window shopping at your favorite
department store. Share an ice-cream sundae with your best friend or
significant other. Go for long walks, or take a dance class. Follow Julia
Cameron’s sage advice and go on an artist date. The point is that sometimes we
just need to get a little perspective. Maybe your creative well is spent and
you need a refill. Maybe you just need to spend more time out in nature, or getting
your blood pumping through some vigorous exercise.

Usually one or
a few of these activities is all I need to get back on track. The problem
however, is that I am stubborn, and I waste far too much time struggling with
the book before I am ready to admit defeat and just go do something else.
Invariably, I come back from watching Dory find her family, or a long walk
along the beachfront near my house, that I found the solution and it seems
incredibly simple now, when just hours ago I was banging my head against the
metaphorical wall.

So there you
go, five tactics that between them usually manage to get me out of my feeling
of being stuck or blocked, if I remember to use them. So pick one, try it and
get back to your WIP. And let me know how it worked.